“We’re moving in the right direction,” said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that says there are more than 2 million such “missing workers.” “We’ve made huge amounts of progress. We’re just not there yet.”

And according to the Economic Policy Institute, there is an “easy-to-understand root of rising income inequality, slow living-standards growth, and a host of other key economic challenges: the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers over the past generation.”

Still, some economists believe that the country hasn’t yet reached a full recovery. They caution that workers with less education and fewer skills continue to lag behind, as do some geographic regions, like the Midwest and South. Compared with before the recession, more workers are sitting out of the labor force entirely, not working and not looking for jobs. And the unemployment rate for African Americans and Hispanics remains above its pre-recession low, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “I think we could aim higher,” Gould said.

Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, was more cautious. Gould said that “we can expect to continue to see improvements in the labor market over the next couple of years as we approach full employment,” but added that the pace of wage growth is “still below levels consistent with the Fed’s target inflation rate and trend productivity growth.”

Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute said there’s no sign that wage growth is putting any worrisome upward pressure on inflation at the moment. But if there’s a hint wages are starting to push prices up, inflation hawks will be clamoring for the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates more aggressively, to cool things down.

Before Obama could even think about shifting structural power, he had to stop the country from hemorrhaging jobs. The Great Recession and its aftermath consumed his first term, and his priority was to keep as many people employed as possible. History will judge him well on this front, said Lawrence Mishel, an economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. With help from Congress, Obama extended unemployment benefits for laid-off workers. He pumped vast stimulus into the economy, both through infrastructure spending and aid to states. And he extended a crucial rescue of the auto industry that began under President George W. Bush. “That was over the resistance of his economic team,” Mishel said of the auto bailout. “It was brave, and it was politically unpopular, except in the Upper Midwest. That had a huge effect.”

This week, minimum-wage workers in 19 states and 23 cities and counties will be getting a bump in their paycheck. In total, 4.3 million people will be getting a raise, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute.

A 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute — a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that gets just over a quarter of its funding from labor unions — found wages and benefits in right-to-work states were lower than those in non-right-to-work states. The study controlled for variables across states (like demographics, jobs, economic conditions and cost-of-living differences) and still found that wages in right-to-work states were 3.1 percent lower than those in non-right-to-work states. There were disparities in employer-sponsored health insurance and pensions, too.

The Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank, reports that right-to-work is associated with lower annual wages of $1,558 for a typical full-time worker. Wages in Kentucky already lag the national average. Pushing wages lower is going in the wrong direction.

The poverty rate for African-Americans is 27.4 percent while just 9.9 percent among whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The unemployment rates for African-Americans are nearly double that of whites – 8.8 percent in the African-American community and 4.3 percent for whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It is now apparent to anyone paying attention that the trends driving the working and middle classes’ woes—from decades of expanding corporate power to the silencing of workers’ voices—will be exacerbated by the incoming Trump administration. Here are six charts from the Economic Policy Institute that underscore the systemic inequities for workers that will persist—and almost certainly worsen—under the right-wing doctrine of Trumponomics

Hornstein, Kudlyak and Lange are not the only researchers to have taken issue with the unemployment rate. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) publishes an alternative unemployment rate that includes “missing workers.” EPI contends that demographic trends suggest that two million more people would be participating in the job market if it were significantly stronger, but that these people are instead counted as out of the labor force.

Other experts agree: On its blog, the Economic Policy Institute recently declared 401(k)s “a poor substitute” for the defined benefit pension plans many workers primarily relied on, which provide a fixed payout for employees at retirement, and which have now become increasingly rare. Nowadays, “just 13% of all private-sector workers have a traditional pension, compared with 38% in 1979,” reports The Journal.

Minimum wages in 19 states went up on January 1, adding more than $4.2 billion in additional wages, according to an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. In seven of these states, the increases were modest — just 5 to 10 cents — the result of inflation indexing as measured by the federal Consumer Price Index.

Nominal wage growth — a key measure of whether workers are seeing adequate growth in their incomes — remains perniciously low, at 12-month accumulated growth rate of 2.36 percent for non-managerial employees; that rate needs to be 4 percent before average workers to begin to feel the benefits of this post-recession recovery, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.

Ron Hira, an Economic Policy Institute research associate and associate professor of public policy at Howard University, sees a change in the first 100 days of the Trump administration as likely. “Obviously Trump has had this as a priority … for executive action for [the first] 100 days,” he said. Beyond that, Hira points to regulatory changes that could come about through the Administrative Procedures Act. He said there’s a possibility of policy guidance from the administration, such as cracking down on visa abuse and changes to immigration enforcement… Hira is doubtful. “The reality of what’s going on is that if they can offshore the work easily, they would already do it,” he said. “There’s nothing that restricts that.”

A 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute also showed that it is the lowest-income workers who face the most irregular schedules. And retail is one of the industries where it is used most prevalently.

Rob Scott, director of trade and manufacturing at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, DC, says the pick shows Trump means business on possibly renegotiating existing trade deals like NAFTA, the agreement that virtually eliminates all border taxes on goods flowing between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Lighthizer, who has a reputation for being a tough negotiator and worked on high-level trade negotiations under Ronald Reagan, has the knowledge and the knowhow to deliver on Trump’s trade agenda.

In 2017, we know that this historic accident isn’t working out for many people. The Center for Retirement Research currently estimates that about 52 percent of households are “at risk of not having enough to maintain their living standards in retirement” with “the outlook for retiring Baby Boomers and Generation Xers far less sanguine than for current retirees.” The Economic Policy Institute says just under half of households headed by someone between the ages of 32 and 61 have nothing saved for retirement.

A left-leaning think tank is firing back at a 2015 report that concluded state employees in Connecticut receive far richer compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. The Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., said the report from the conservative Yankee Institute, which found public-sector workers in Connecticut receive total pay and benefits between 25 and 46 percent higher than comparable private-sector workers, “is simply not correct” and that the two groups’ compensation is close to equal.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-profit American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that “seeks to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions” through the publication of research and policy discussions, noted in a post published in July 2016 that the federal minimum wage, which is sets a floor at $7.25 per hour, would be much higher if it had kept up with a growing economy. “As the top line in the graph shows, had the minimum wage kept pace with rising productivity [from 1968], it would be nearly $19 per hour today. Not $7.25,” EPI said in the post.

“Some of what Trump tapped into was people wanting to be paid more,” said David Cooper, analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “Voting for a minimum-wage increase is one of the ways to make that happen for a lot people.” In all, about 4.4 million low-wage workers across the country are slated to receive a raise because they earn less than the new minimum in their respective states, according to EPI.

Moreover, the racial wealth gap sits at its worst level in a generation and, as Valerie Wilson of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote, the “rise in overall wage inequality [has] mechanically separated black and white workers’ wages” over the past 35 years, since black workers were more likely to be working low-wage jobs to begin with.

The Economic Policy Institute, for example, calculates that these “missing workers” — prime-age people who are neither working nor looking for work but would be in a fully healthy economy — number about 2.3 million people. If they were successfully pulled into the job market over the next decade, they would provide only about an 0.15 percentage point annual boost.

Wages for Americans with only high school diplomas have declined by 2 percent since the late 1970s, and for those who didn’t finish high school, they have declined by nearly 20 percent, according to Economic Policy Institute figures.

A 2013 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that median wages hovered around $15 an hour in states where 30% or less of working adults had bachelor’s degrees. For states where more than 40% had bachelor’s degrees, median hourly wages were $19 to $20, an annual difference of $10,000 for full-time employees.

Those raises could have more staying power than the legislation itself. Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, said it isn’t clear yet whether or not the rule and the higher overtime threshold will survive after the inauguration. Donald Trump’s stated opposition to corporate regulations makes him unlikely to support defending it in court, although Eisenbray said at least one organized labor group is positioning itself to continue defending it even if a Jeff Sessions-led Department of Justice declines to do so. This ambiguity around the legislation’s fate could prompt companies to take a better-safe-than-sorry approach, Eisenbray said, since it would be hugely expensive to have to pay months of overtime retroactively.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.